Reading life review: August

Books read this month: 26
Books read in 2011: 87

■ The Time Machine (H.G. Wells)
Classic science fiction. With the Misses. Followed up with the 1960 film starring Rod Taylor. Both the book and the movie hold up under repeated re-reading, -watching.

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers."

■ Umbrella Summer (Lia Graff)
Juvenile fiction. Following the aftermath of her brother's unexpected death, Annie fears everything, from bee stings to ebola. Graff gently and sensitively explores death and loss through the eyes of her Junie B. Jones-inspired protagonist, but I think she utterly missed the mark with Annie's clueless parents. The Misses shared my concern. What are they thinking? we exclaimed several times.

■ Sarah's Key (Tatiana de Rosay)
Fiction. This fictionalized account of Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv might have been a worthy addition to Holocaust literature had it not been so badly (awfully, terribly) written. Not only is the resolution of the book's central mystery and horror apparent by the middle of the third chapter, but the compelling story of Sarah and her family is sandwiched between dull, predictable bits about a middle-aged American journalist growing weary of her cheating French husband. Not recommended.

■ Never Look Away (Linwood Barclay)
Fiction. As I've mentioned before (here and here), Barclay's novels are beach books: capably written, entertaining, and not too easy to piece together halfway through. Perhaps this one strained credulity more than the others I've swallowed whole this summer, but that might just be the stitches talking. Heh, heh, heh.

■ Blank Confession (Pete Hautman)
YA fiction. I've read a number of Hautman's books. Godless was one pretty terrific read, as was Invisible. Rash? Meh. But this? Solid. And timely. The hook -- a teen has walked into a police station to confess to a murder -- is well employed, and the narrative hums and clicks along, even as it explores bullying and drug use among teens. Recommended.

■ Joy for Beginners (Erica Bauermeister)
Fiction. File this one under "reading like a girl" -- or "perfect for bed rest." Kate has survived cancer. Accepting the challenge to go on white-rafting trip to celebrate her victory, she, in turn, issues each of her friends a life challenge. What could have been predictable and trite ended up being warm and life-affirming.

■ Boy Heaven (Laura Kasischke)
■ Feathered (Laura Kasischke)
YA fiction. Speaking of reading like a girl... I picked up several Kasischke novels after enjoying The Raising and The Life Before Her Eyes in May. Boy Heaven is an urban legend framed as a ghost story, and this is just the sort of story my fifteen-year-old self would have loved, although I think my fifteen-year-old self would have been rather perplexed by Feathered. My forty-seven-year-old thought both were pretty terrific, and I'll now be tempted to urge any teen who murmurs, "Spring break," in my presence to read the latter. Carefully.

■ Daytripper (Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon)
Graphic novel. From a Publisher's Weekly review earlier this year:

A stunning, moving story about one man's life and all the possibilities to be realized or lost along the way. Brothers Bá and Moon take readers through the life of a man named Brás de Oliva Domingos, selecting a series of individual events of great significance to Brás, showing each as if it could be the day Brás dies, and in so doing creating an examination of family, friendship, love, art, life, and death that urges the reader to turn the same careful inspection on their own life.

Beautiful art and beautiful writing. I loved this book.

■ In a Perfect World (Laura Kasischke)
Fiction. As much as I've been enjoying my whirlwind tour of Kasischke's oeuvre, I was fairly certain she could no longer surprise me. I was wrong. In a Perfect World coyly misleads an inattentive reader into thinking that it will be a beautifully written exploration of otherwise mundane subjects: a doomed marriage and an equally doomed foray into step-motherhood. And then it blossoms into a melancholy meditation on the end of the world as we know it and how we might become our most authentic selves when it all falls apart. If my previous recommendations haven't persuaded you to give a Kasischke a try, let this one do so. Good, good stuff here, folks.

■ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Alan Jacobs)
Non-fiction. Highly recommended. Chapbook entry here; two other related entries here and here.

■ One Day (David Nicholls)
Fiction. Nicholls writes so well that it almost saddens me to admit how much this silly book annoyed me. I will tell you that I started and stopped and skipped ahead so many times that when I finally returned to it this month I was essentially rereading the entire book (which, I'm sure, added to my annoyance because who would willingly reread this?). Perhaps I was also annoyed by the cloying advertisements for the opening of what will likely be a heavy-handed adaptation of the book starring Anne Hathaway as the -- SPOILER ALERT! -- doomed-from-the-moment-she-met-'im Emma.

■ The Idle Parent (Tom Hodgkinson)
Non-fiction. Apparently just as it took me a year to finish One Day, it took me a year to finish The Idle Parent. I was thinking about reading it in July and then acquired it later that month. I must have begun reading it because I quoted from it in August. And then? Nothing. It was tucked away with a bookmark, and as I did with One Day, I returned to it during my recovery this month -- though with much happier results. I must admit that Hodgkinson's tra-la-la paean to benignly neglectful parenting is probably best read in snippets because reading it all at once might put one in mind of Polonius' collection of platitudes masquerading as wisdom. Chapbook entry here and another related entry here.

■ Drawing Birds (John Busby)
Non-fiction. Highly recommended. Chapbook entry here.

■ Be Mine (Laura Kasischke)
■ Suspicion River (Laura Kasischke)
■ White Bird in a Blizzard (Laura Kasischke)
Fiction. Suspicion River and White Bird in a Blizzard were Kasischke's first two novels; Be Mine was published in 2007. That I didn't care for River or Mine is my own fault; I should have read the descriptions more carefully, instead of letting my unbridled enthusiasm for In a Perfect World lead me to acquire Kasisichke's remaining novels. Just... grimly explicit and not my cuppa. And White Bird? Meh. Also pretty graphic and dark; more, I saw the conclusion coming.

■ Want to Go Private? (Sarah Littman)
YA fiction. An honors student on the social fringes begins high school with some fear, but soon after connecting with an older boy in a teen chat room, she finds a friend in whom she can confide her concerns. His attention makes her feel compelling -- even attractive. This book's frank treatment of a young girl's seduction by an online predator was so lurid that it can only be described as an R-rated "Afterschool Special."

■ Mid-Life (Joe Ollmann)
Graphic novel. Promising but, in the end, not one of my best encounters with this genre. I found the pages too "heavy" -- too dense and dark with image and text. And really? The protagonist is not at all likeable.

■ A Hope in the Unseen (Ron Suskind)
Non-fiction. Suskind won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for the series of articles that grew into A Hope in the Unseen, the chronicle of Cedric Lavar Jennings' journey from an impoverished and dangerous Washington, D.C., public high school to Brown University. Subtitled "An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League," Unseen unflinchingly and repeatedly points out that Jennings didn't graduate from Brown (and later, Harvard and the University of Michigan, according the afterword in this revised and updated edition) because of extraordinary academic gifts; he succeeded through hard work alone -- the grueling, single-minded study of a "headstrong monk." I was transfixed by the story, a result of its compelling subject as well as Suskind's assured narrative style. Highly recommended.

■ A New Culture of Learning (Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown)
Non-fiction. Chapbook entry here.

■ The Accident (Linwood Barclay)
Fiction. And with this, I had my fill of Barclay. It was fun while it lasted.

■ The Hypnotist (Lars Kepler)
Fiction. It seems as if I've had a bookmark in this for most of the summer. It finally captured my imagination -- in the way a particularly implausible but generally riveting episode of "Criminal Minds" will -- late on the last Saturday of the month. Twenty-four hours later, I set it aside with satisfaction. A gruesome, sordid, and suspenseful exploration of human weakness, frailty, and, yes, evil -- as I said, not unlike an episode of "Criminal Minds."

■ This Beautiful Life (Helen Schulman)
Fiction. What was the author thinking, invoking The Great Gatsby -- perhaps the original wealthy-Americans-experience-angst-too story -- at the mid-point of this overwrought novel? The comparison only made This Beautiful Life seem... more baldly less than. Sure, I'm a bit tetchy as I write this, but seriously? I finished with two thoughts: (1) I'll never get that afternoon back; and (2) Another book with unlikeable characters behaving stupidly -- bleah. Maria Russo (NYT, July 28) loved it, by the way. Did we read the same book?

■ Beginner's Guide to Traditional Archery (Brian Sorrells)
Non-fiction. Because I cannot WAIT to use my new bow!

■ This Girl Is Different (J.J. Johnson)
YA fiction. A mostly predictable YA treatment of the "homeschooled kid decides to attend public high school -- and change the world!" story -- although I did appreciate the strong, intelligent protagonist.

"English departments have tended to become intellectual nursing homes where old ideas go to die."

From "What Killed American Lit.?" by M-mv favorite Joseph Epstein (WSJ, August 27):

In today's university, no one is any longer in a position to say which books are or aren't fit to teach; no one any longer has the authority to decide what is the best in American writing. Too bad, for even now there is no consensus about who are the best American novelists of the past century. (My own candidates are Cather and Theodore Dreiser.) Nor will you read a word, in the pages of "The Cambridge History of the American Novel," about how short-lived are likely to be the sex-obsessed works of the much-vaunted novelists Norman Mailer, John Updike and Philip Roth or about the deleterious effect that creative-writing programs have had on the writing of fiction.

With the gates once carefully guarded by the centurions of high culture now flung open, the barbarians flooded in, and it is they who are running the joint today. The most lauded novelists in "The Cambridge History of the American Novel" tend to be those, in the words of another of its contributors, who are "staging a critique of 'America' and its imperial project." Thus such secondary writers as Allen Ginsberg, Kurt Vonnegut and E.L. Doctorow are in these pages vaunted well beyond their literary worth.

"...I’m reluctant to read a book that shows any sign of prior occupancy."

From "What We Do to Books" (NYT, 8/26):

Other than that mark the book should be in near-mint condition when I start reading it, but I am not obsessive about keeping it that way. On the contrary, I like the way it gradually and subtly shows signs of wear and tear, of having been lived in (by me), like a pair of favorite jeans.

A public service announcement

Get in the picture!
Yes, even -- perhaps, especially -- if you're making a goofy face.

Four links

Two links from today's Chicago Tribune:

1. From "'Bad mothering' lawsuit dismissed":

In court papers, Garrity's attorney Shelley Smith said the "litany of childish complaints and ingratitude" in the lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt by Garrity's ex-husband to "seek the ultimate revenge" of having her children accuse her of "being an inadequate mother."

"It would be laughable that these children of privilege would sue their mother for emotional distress, if the consequences were not so deadly serious" for Garrity, Smith wrote. "There is no insurance for this claim, so (Garrity) must pay her legal fees, while (the children) have their father for free."

(File this one under "Other people's lives are much more complicated than mine.")

2. From "Books move us — and we move books":

Because August is the traditional month for moving — college students report to dorms, families settle into new homes just in time for the start of the school year — I've been looking at my books and remembering how many times I've moved them.

I've been recalling all the occasions upon which I've pulled them off the shelves, one by one, row by row, bookcase by bookcase, and packed them into boxes, and then taped the boxes shut, and then lifted the boxes — I can feel the ache in my lower back all over again, just as I can hear a friend scolding me from across the room, "Lift with your legs! Lift with your legs!" — and then, staggering under the heavy load, stacked the boxes in a rented truck or dumped them in a car trunk.

The fun part comes at the new place: opening the boxes, pulling out the books one by one, slotting them back on the shelves. Each time I've done this, I have discovered my books anew. It's like falling in love all over again.

(And file this one under "Oh, I know!")

And two links from the incomparable Girl Detective:

1. From "Summer Cinema Worth Debating" (New York Times, August 28):

This summer, by my count, three movies have been especially divisive, provoking strong and interesting schisms among critics and also among people who actually buy tickets — or so I surmise, having spent the past few months trawling Internet comment threads, sipping cocktails in civilian company and eavesdropping on the subway while pretending to play Angry Birds on my phone. Those three films, in chronological order of release, are “The Tree of Life,” “The Future” and “The Help.”

Each one has been fiercely defended and sharply attacked, and in every case the debate has encompassed the kind of issues that are usually too large, lofty or contentious to be tackled on their own.

2. From "The Secret Language Code" (Scientific American, August 16):

One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.

I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached -- hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.

Chapbook entry

A New Culture of Learning (Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown)

p. 72

The connection between the personal and collective is a key ingredient in lifelong learning. Amateur astronomers looking to the sky for new discoveries, Andrew Sullivan blogging, college students studying, and kids reading over their summer break all demonstrate how pervasive this dynamic is in our contemporary landscape for learning. They also all point to the same thing: the fact that technology has now made connecting personal interests to collectives possible, easy, fun, and playful because people are inspired to think past the boundaries and limitations of their current situations. Kiva's funding of microloans, for example, does more than make new businesses in the developing world possible; it makes them imaginable.

p. 79

Imagine a situation where two students are learning to play piano. The lesson for the day is a Bach prelude. The first student attacks the piano forcefully, banging out each note correctly but with a violent intensity that is uncharacteristic for the style of the piece. The second student seems to view the written score as a loose framework; he varies the rhythm, modifies the melody, and follows his own internal muse. In today's classroom, the teacher will see two students "doing it wrong." In the new culture of learning, the teacher will see a budding rock star and a jazz musician.

Note: Um, what? A competent music teacher will introduce Bach -- the elements of his compositional style, the idea of polyphony, the context of the piece that will be assigned, etc. -- and then assign the piece. If one of that teacher's students "bangs out each note" and the other varies, modifies, and "follows his own internal muse" after all of that, they are, in fact, doing it wrong -- regardless of what type of music each student prefers.

This book has some provocative ideas, but at times there was a glibness at work that was alternately annoying and worrisome.

p. 97

Play, we believe, in keeping with [Johan] Huizinga [author of Homo Ludens], is probably the most overlooked aspect in understanding how learning functions in culture. It is easy to identify spaces in which the information network provides opportunities for play, online games being a clear example. But thinking about play as a disposition, rather than as merely engaging with a game, reveals something more fundamental at work. Much of what makes play powerful as a tool for learning is our ability to engage in experimentation. All systems of play are, at base, learning systems. They are ways of engaging in complicated negotiations of meaning, interaction, and competition, not only for entertainment, but also for creating meaning. Most critically, play reveals a structure of learning that is radically different from the one that most schools or other formal learning environments provide, and which is well suited to the notions of a world in constant flux.

p. 116

Think back to the assertions that Huizinga put forward in Homo Ludens: (1) Play is more than something we do, it is who we are, and (2) play precedes culture. We want to add to those concepts by proposing that play fuses the two elements of learning that we have been talking about: the information network and the petri dish (or bounded environment of experimentation). That fusion is what we call the new culture of learning. The critical idea is that the two elements -- of information and experimentation -- are being brought together in a way that transforms them both. It is that fusion that defines the new culture of learning.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Butterflies at the Brookfield Zoo

Stingray Bay at Brookfield Zoo

"Once ordinary people note that we're doing something useful again, they might stop looking at us like we're nuts."

From "Literature Brings the Physical Past to Life" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 20):

Americans admire practicality, and our profession has become esoteric and politicized. Today's literary scholarship too often serves as a vehicle for politics, and even professors who care little for public opinion are eager to indoctrinate students in their views. We seem to have given up on the notion that literature itself can be useful. But in doing so, we are forgetting a crucial function of the books we study.

History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us as close as we can come to reinhabiting the past. By reclaiming this use of literature in the classroom, perhaps we can move away from the political agitation that has been our bread and butter—or porridge and hardtack—for the last 30 years.

Two links

Girl Detective sends the coolest links:

1. an article on grief memoirs from Friday's Guardian: "Too much grief"; and

2. another on "great books" of which some authors and editors are none too fond: "Overrated" (Slate, August 11).

By the numbers

268
The number of times I've asked, "Are you sure my hair looks okay?" We started seeing a new gal three haircuts ago. The Misses and I were stoked after our first cuts with her. The second? She went pretty short, but we each liked the results well enough. Yesterday, though, I ended up with a really short crop, including pixie bangs. The thing is, I think I really like it. It's just not what I asked for.

17
The number of books I've read so far this month. I'm not reading faster (probably quite the contrary post-The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction); I've simply had a great deal more time.

12
The number of days since surgery. My recovery continues to go as well as it could possibly go -- again, thanks to Mr. M-mv, the Misses, good rest, juicing, and walking.

9
The number of mornings I've walked, beginning on Day 4, post-surgery.

1.4
The number of miles I'm walking. Yes, still. It's a familiar loop though our neighborhood, complete with a few strategic inclines and a small lake at which I can stop -- ostensibly to admire a heron or goose but mostly to have some water. I'm thinking we can make two passes (for a total of 2.8 miles) beginning this Thursday, though.

16
The number of days until our next archery lesson. Keeping my fingers crossed that I will be cleared to participate.

4
The number of boxes I'm expecting from the UPS guy today. I am not a wanton consumer. There were just a few books and art supplies we needed.

And a beautiful sweater I wanted.

A lot.

31
The number of days until autumn begins (and I can wear my new sweater).

Chapbook entry

Drawing Birds (John Busby)

p. 12

Correctness can become an obsession, and in some pictures one can imagine the artist ticking off a checklist of detail to be included before a bird can be considered finished. This is a formidable inhibition; one that can make a beginner doubt his or her own observation and suppress original creative ideas.

p. 20

Art is a synthesis; a unity of ideas and the means to express them. In a painting there has to be a pictorial reason for the relationships that are made between shapes and spaces, lights and darks, colours, rhythms of line -- everything that controls the movement of the eye as the painting is read. These forces only come together in a work of art. They do not exist in nature in a relationship under human control. In a picture they are governed by the artist's choice. One cannot draw or paint "what one sees" in front of one without being aware of what is happening on the page or canvas in the process. However fascinating the subject matter, we need an equal fascination with the whole business of making marks with which, in a child-like way, we can identify. To copy nature without resolving our own thoughts and feelings is a barren experience.

p. 25

Drawing taught to rigid rules seldom produces anything with real vision behind it. So much depends on a gut feeling for what matters. There are no rules governing the emphasis an artist may choose to put on something, or on what to leave unsaid. The "tone of voice" of a drawing will be different for every artist, and, as in speech, may convey more than the "words" themselves.

p. 34

Drawing is a way of learning to see. Draw anything and you will know it better than before, even if the drawing is not up to much.

p. 39

Drawing is like the unravelling of a mystery, a search for the true nature of an experience. Such drawing, which is not often seen outside the artist's studio, can be far more exciting to read that a carefully finished picture, where the process of creation is no longer visible.

p. 110

Drawing is the next best thing to flying. Sometimes the drawing crash-lands before it is truly airborne. But sometimes a drawing soars.

p. 134

With so much of our wildlife under threat, the more we can cement emotional links to nature in a deep, appreciative, but unsentimental way, the more it will strengthen the public will for conservation.

Related entry here.

I've been singing this song for eight years.

In fact, the following article reads like a companion piece to my post last week: "This ugly partnership of deceit."

From "The Debt Crisis at American Colleges" (The Atlantic, August 17):

So here's a low-cost plan, even if it won't win envy points at the country club. Let's suppose you live in Pueblo, Colorado. Your child's first two years can be at the local community college, where the annual tab is $3,399. The classes tend to be small, unlike the mega-lectures at the flagship schools; the faculty gives full attention to teaching, since they're not pressured to churn out research. Moreover, every community college has a liberal arts division. You can study philosophy and history, as well as air conditioning repair. For your last two years, Pueblo will facilitate a transfer to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, where tuition is $6,985, with room and board at $8,744. Entering as a junior, you'll find it easier to find and enroll with interesting professors. Total four-year cost: $38,256. We'd hope this is a sum parents could put in a college fund. And if you apply yourself at Fort Collins, its faculty will give you strong recommendations. Harvard law school, Stanford medical school, and Chicago business school make a point of looking for promising candidates from places like Colorado State. In fact, they may take you over graduates of Tulane (who laid out $206,821) or Georgetown ($214,364).

Related entries
■ “Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education.”

■ “‘You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.’”

■ Community college

■ Paying for college, revisited

■ Paying for college: A rant of modest proportions

■ About college

Chapbook entry

The Idle Parent (Tom Hodgkinson)

p. 31
From "Stop the Whining":

Better to be penniless and at home than rich and absent, certainly during the first three or four years of each child's life. There will be plenty of time for hard work for you when they grow up. Your work, I'm afraid, is not particularly important and certainly not as important or as pleasurable as ensuring that your kids enjoy their first years.

p. 40
From "Seek Not Perfection, or Why Bad Parents Are Good Parents":

For the idle mother it is not a choice between "going back to work" or "staying at home." She explores that vast and rich territory between those two barren poles. She creates her own job, one that she can fit around her children or even stop doing for a few years. And having made a conscious decision to both work and look after the children, she enjoys both. It is our habit of seeing life as a series of burdens imposed on us by outside forces that creates misery. Once we recognize that we are free and responsible creatures, the burden is lifted. We must smash artificial dualisms.

p. 153
From "No More Family Days Out":

The truly idle delight instead in staying at home. At home you are free. You can create your own fun, at no cost whatsoever. You can let the children run around while you read a book. There is a world of adventure and learning under your own roof and on your own doorstep. [...] You don't need to leave the house. We think we are enjoying ourselves at the theme park, but really it's a disabling sort of fun because it's passive. It actually follows the familiar pattern of twenty-first-century life: long periods of boredom interspersed with the occasional thrill.

p. 155

You can also use time with the children to learn things yourself. Now is the time to teach yourself to draw. Draw with them. Learn to draw animals by copying from books. I taught myself how to draw a simple crab and simple lobster while on holiday in Cornwall. Once you have reduced animal drawing to a few basics, you can then teach the kids and they'll be mighty pleased with their own results. We give too much responsibility for learning and being creative to the schools. We must learn and teach at home. This need not be a trial, but can be a great joy for parent and child. But you must always make sure that you are genuinely enjoying yourself. Doing things for other people's sake will lead to feelings of corrosive resentment that will then find expression in some unhealthy fashion, like cancer. Your first responsibility is to your own happiness. If you are unhappy and you do things merely out of a sense of duty rather than genuine love and generosity, then others will sense that and ugliness will result.

p. 196
From "Say 'Yes'":

But are we hungry? Are we cold? Are we homeless? Are we in jail? No. Are we free to change our lives, to quit our jobs, walk out on our homes, leave our wives or husbands? Yes. The point is, if you are not happy with your situation, then you should change it. And do not believe that you are powerless, because you yourself created the situation that you now find yourself in. You also created the mental attitude that you have toward that situation, and similarly, if you so chose, you could re-create that mental attitude. This is not to say that pain is not real. Bereavements, domestic conflict, financial disasters... as Blake, the bard of Albion, wrote:

Man was made for joy and woe;
And this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.

p. 206
From "Learn How to Live from Your Kids":

Idle parents will never sacrifice themselves to their children. They will carry on with their own lives, and the kids will learn and grow in the slipstream. But they will respect their little creatures and observe their ways with interest. Children say funny things. And you can always learn from them. The important thing in parenting is not what you do but your relationship with your child. It is how you are that counts. Rather than try to follow a list of somebody else's rules, we must concentrate first and foremost on our mental attitude toward our children. And a certain sense of gratitude toward them for being in our lives may be one way to start.

p. 251
From "Don't Fret about Computers, or Toward a Tao of Parenting":

I am mindful of the importance of the present moment, because, in actual fact, that's all we have. All else is illusion. I have also realized that, particularly while the children are small, it is far better to be poor in money (or credit) and rich in time than vice versa. We will always be able to eat and to sleep in a bed at night. So I would rather be at home and go without a holiday and drive an old banger or have no car at all than work too hard and spend the cash. And there's no need to suffer: I am going to keep drinking beer, reading books and playing the uke. A life free from pleasure is no life at all.

Related entry: From the archives: Being idle.

"Primary Education of the Camiroi"

Through The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Alan Jacobs; related entries here, here, and here) I learned of R.A. Lafferty and "Primary Education of the Camiroi."

He will have learned to use his whole mind, for the vast reservoirs which are the unconscious to us are not unconscious to him. Everything in him is ordered for use. And there seems to be no great secret about the accomplishments, only to do everything slowly enough and in the right order: thus they avoid repetition and drill which are the shriveling things which dull the quick apperception.

Read the whole story here.

"Maybe it means art is a bit of a joke."

Sometimes I am the last to know. For example, I am likely the last to know that access to more than nine thousand "Instant Videos Now" is available -- FREE! -- with Amazon Prime.

How cool is that?

So I finally got to see Exit through the Gift Shop, which was thoroughly entertaining. Hoax? Prankumentary? Half-truth? Who knows? It was certainly eighty-six minutes well spent, if for no other reason than this:

I told him I'd never seen anything like it, and I wasn't lying about that. You know, I was faced with that terrible thing when somebody shows you their work, and everything about it is shit, so you don't really know where to start.

Heh, heh, heh. Recommended.

Chapbook entry

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Alan Jacobs)

p. 11
On the subject of prescriptive reading:

It would be easy enough to dismiss Adler and Van Doren and Fadiman et al. for pedantry, but as I have already indicated the American reading public, or a significant chunk of it anyway, can't take its readerly pleasure straight but has to cut it with a sizable splash of duty. Books that aren't certifiably good for you are, in this way of thinking, to be suspected -- and to read for "entertainment," or the sheer pleasure of this thing, verges of the morally unjustifiable.

p. 55
On the subject of writing in the margins:

Reading is more challenging and more enjoyable -- more worth the candle -- if we are willing to answer the questions a text puts to us, even (or especially) if those questions are implicit.

p. 67
On the subject of reading slowly:

It's what you're reading that matters, and how you're reading it, not the speed with which you're getting through it. Reading is supposed to be about the encounter with other minds, not an opportunity to return to the endlessly appealing subject of Me.

p. 73

We read what we want, when we want, and there is no one to assign or to evaluate. We are free readers. And for us, the attempt to read noninstrumental texts in an instrumental way -- to read fiction or poetry or history or theology or even what the bookstores call "current events" as quickly as possible and with the goal of accurate transference of data -- is not a good idea. It is in fact a perfect recipe for boredom, because, though few people realize it, many books become more boring the faster you read them.

p. 114
On the subject of school reading:

Education is and should be primarily about intellectual navigation, about -- I scruple not to say it -- skimming well, and reading carefully for information in order to upload content. Slow and patient reading, by contrast, properly belongs to our leisure hours.

p. 132
On the subject of rereading:

[R]ereading can be a product not of simple dissatisfaction, nor of the fan's utter enchantment, but rather of some curious mix of gratification and a feeling of incompletion. You can reread not from love or hatred but from a sense, often inchoate, that there's more to this book than you have yet been able to receive.

p. 133
On the subject of judging a book:

Critical reflection of some kind is inevitable, so it would behoove us to do it well. The best guide I know to readerly judgment is our old friend Auden, who graciously summed up a lifetime of thinking about these matters in a single incisive sentence: "For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don't like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see this is trash but I like it; I can see this is trash and I don't like it."

p. 143
On the subject of serendipity (a subject dear to me):

Fortuity happens, but serendipity can be cultivated. You can grow in serendipity.

p. 145

The cultivation of serendipity is an option for anyone, but for people living in conditions of prosperity and security and informational richness it is something vital. To practice "accidental sagacity" is to recognize that I don't really know where I am going, even if I like to think I do, or think Google does; that if I know what I am looking for, I do not therefore know what I need; that I am not master of my destiny and captain of my fate; that it is probably a very good thing that I am not master of my destiny and captain of my fate. An accidental sagacity may be a form of wisdom I most need, but am least likely to find without eager pursuit. Moreover, serendipity is the near relation of Whim; each stands against the Plan.

Plan once appealed to me, but I have grown to be a natural worshiper of Serendipity and Whim; I can try to serve other gods, but my heart is never in it. I truly think I would rather read an indifferent book on a lark than a fine one according to schedule and plan.

p. 149
Concluding thoughts:

To pick up a book -- to decide to read something, almost anything -- is to choose a particular form of attention. That choice creates simultaneously silence and receptiveness to a voice; the reader acts imaginatively, constructing meaning from the experience of finding words on a page, but also, ideally, strives to assume a posture of charity toward what he or she reads. This choosing reader is never merely passive, never simply a consumer, but constantly engages in critical judgment, sometimes withholding sympathy with a thoughtful wariness, and then, in the most blessed moments, when trust has been earned, giving that sympathy wholly and without stint.

Related entries here and here.

"I am by no means abandoning the online world."

So I finally discover Alan Jacobs' blog -- Text Patterns at The New Atlantis -- and, alas! I am too late. About a week too late. Writes Jacobs in his August 15 entry:

And you know, blogs have natural lifespans, or so I think; few of them can continue indefinitely without diminishment. Especially when they are issue-based blogs. Who wants to watch someone ride the same old hobby-horses year after year?

So I am stepping away. I will continue to write about the issues I wrote about here, but in longer formats and elsewhere.

Jacobs keeps an online commonplace book -- More than 95 Theses -- but after reading his The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (related entry here), I think I was looking forward to continuing the conversation, so to speak, via regular blog entries.

My loss, for certain.

Later this weekend, I plan to post a chapbook entry from Pleasures. Until then, the following is Jacobs discussing the book at the Hudson Institute on June 3, 2011.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

"West Memphis 3" free after nearly twenty years in prison

News story here. Related M-mv entries here and here.

By the numbers

7
The number of days post-surgery. It's going as well as it could possibly go, I think, thanks to Mr. M-mv, the Misses, good rest, and juicing. And maybe even those walks.

1.4
The number of miles I walked each morning this week. No, it's not much by many standards, but it's pretty durned awesome, considering.

343
The number of times I've said, "When do you think Dr. M. will say I can ride my bike?" We're woefully behind our goal, thanks to me and my surgery.

2
The number of television shows I follow: "Project Runway: Season 9" and... "Dance Moms." I was going to say, "It's my guilty pleasure," about the latter, but I don't feel one bit guilty. It's like watching a bloodless train wreck, and it helps that I've mentally re-cast the entire show with swim moms and their offspring. I thoroughly enjoy that one hour each Wednesday. No apologies.

2
The number of books I purchased with another gift card Aunt M-mv gave me: What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell and Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools (Steven Brill).

2
The number of books I expect to finish this afternoon during piano lessons: Mid-Life (Joe Ollmann) and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Alan Jacobs).

70
The number of minutes until said lesson. I'd better get hopping.

Hey, leave a message in the comments about what you're reading and watching.

The recommended daily allowance

Five and half years ago, I wrote:

For thirteen summers, Timothy Treadwell lived among the grizzly bears of Katmai National Park and Reserve in Alaska. In fall 2003, he and his companion Amie Huguenard were killed and consumed by an unfamiliar bear when the couple made an unplanned return to the so-called "Grizzly Maze" after arguing with airline personnel about their return flight.

Grizzly Man is Werner Herzog's documentary about Treadwell's life and death among the bears. It is an unsettling and thought-provoking film not only because we know from the outset how it will end but because this presentation juxtaposes Treadwell's maniacally idealistic view of man's relationship to and with nature with Herzog's implacable pessimism: "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder."

Don't miss this one.

On Tuesday I had an opportunity to re-watch Herzog's documentary and was reminded afresh how compelling and truly excellent it is.

Need a laugh?

This morning, Aunt M-mv sent me a link to "The Most Brilliantly Pointless Street Fliers." Laughter ensued. (Caution: Perhaps not for my most sensitive readers.)

Archery

Related entry here.

The recommended daily allowance

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (A film by Werner Herzog; 2011)

Brilliant. Beautiful. Don't miss this perfect documentary about the Chauvet Cave and the beginning of "human-ness." (Related entry here.)

By the numbers

71
The temperature here in the backyard of the forever home, as of 10:07 a.m.

4
The number of days since my surgery.

3
The number of fresh juices Mr. M-mv has been making me each day.

675
The number of times I have thanked the universe for Mr. M-mv since I woke up from surgery on Thursday afternoon.

1.4
The number of miles I walked this morning. Slowly. But I did it.

9 and 10
The grades Miss M-mv(ii) and Miss M-mv(i), respectively, begin today.

2
The number of books I read yesterday. Not the books I planned, by the way, but decent companions post-surgery: Blank Confession (Pete Hautmann) and Joy for Beginners (Erica Bauermeister).

2
The number of books I ordered with the gift card Aunt M-mv gave me: Lee Krasner: A Biography (Gail Levin) and News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist (Laurie Hertzel; recommended by Girl Detective).

1
The number of days until our bows arrive. We're taking this pursuit to the next level and have invested in some of our own equipment. And, yes, we're excited.

You know what they say: "They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity..."

From "Awards for the masses" (Chicago Tribune, August 14):

We are about to send our twins — the last two of our three children — off to college, where, if the pattern continues, they will, no doubt, continue to feel like the masters of excellence that neither of them ever has been and may, in fact, never be. I speak of the awards and prizes.

Was it merely two months ago my husband and I sat through two graduation ceremonies, one for each twin at their separate high schools? At the nearly three-hour pre-commencement awards ceremony at one twin's public high school, 255 awards — small financial scholarships, plaques, pins — were given out. The class was about 450 students. At our daughter's private school, with a class of 109, 50 awards were bestowed. In both cases, some 50 percent of the graduating class is superb, headed for greatness, the next Einstein, special. And if you don't believe that fully half is truly exceptional, you're clearly not listening to the commencement speeches. At our daughter's commencement, the headmaster spoke of the extraordinary talent, intelligence, drive and imagination of the graduating seniors. Really? These are kids whose parents pay something like 30K to send them to a top private school. Is it any wonder, then, that they launch blogs and travel around the world? Are they truly that gifted or merely somewhat gifted children of financially gifted parents? [Emphasis added.]

A few thoughts after seeing Waiting for Superman

Why wasn't the traditional classroom model challenged?
Francisco is clearly interested in reading and learning and seems to have no difficulty with either. His mother is committed to cultivating a home environment that values academic achievement. The problem? Well, he is shown to be completely disconnected from what occurs in his classroom. Whether this is a product of the number of students, the material presented, the quality of the teacher, or what is unclear, but he is clearly disengaged. To me, his story begged a discussion of the failure of the traditional classroom model (i.e., one teacher at the head of a large classroom of students of the same age (as opposed to ability)).

Stop perpetuating the myth that every student must go to college to be "successful."
Seen just hours after reading Walter V. Wendler's perspective piece in the Trib, Superman seemed woefully shortsighted in its insistence that success can only be measured by college attendance, particularly when one considers the issues of student loan debt, the attrition rate not just among disadvantaged student populations but among all student populations, and the poor jobs outlook in many fields.

Is there any other profession in which tenure (perhaps by another name) exists?
I'm not being coy or provocative. I really don't know. A quick spin through the Wikipedia entry on tenure helps me to understand the roots of academic tenure: "[I]t protects teachers and researchers when they dissent from prevailing opinion, openly disagree with authorities of any sort, or spend time on unfashionable topics." But it is a policy designed to breed contentment with "good enough," at best, and to promote mediocrity, at worst. Why has it endured?

Enough of the graphics and bullet points.
It's a documentary, not a Powerpoint presentation.

"This ugly partnership of deceit"

Writing in Friday's Chicago Tribune, Walter V. Wendler, director of the School of Architecture and former chancellor of Southern Illinois University, argues that the college loans are often akin to academic welfare.

Low-cost housing is available to students. Day care is provided. Food is cheap on meal plans. All students need to do is enroll to have access to student loans, with new loans available every year, so long as they don't leave the university community.

Pressured to maintain enrollment, many institutions allow students to remain on campus with grades that do not meet a reasonable standard of progress. It is sad that the National Collegiate Athletic Association requires steps toward academic progress for student athletes that may exceed general university requirements for satisfactory performance.

Wendler suggests that when universities lower or overlook academic eligibility requirements and lenders continue to extend credit, they are motivated less by the desire to provide a student with "opportunity" and more by the need to meet enrollment goals and the profitability of bankruptcy-proof loans at above-market rates, respectively. He writes:

The sole purpose of attaining a degree should not be the utility it provides for a person to earn a living. However, uncollateralized education loans are reminiscent of the housing loans that ravaged the economy in the name of "opportunity." It is not the role of government to provide each person a decent place to live, but, instead, to ensure their right to pursue one. Likewise, it cannot be the role of government to provide a university education to all.

To lend to those incapable of attaining a degree or to allow students to continue to borrow when the chances of success approach nil is indefensible without a "buyer beware" warning. The travesty being played out in a recklessly managed lending environment will haunt people for the rest of their lives. Ask anyone who has an "underwater" home mortgage. Was that opportunity a gift or an albatross?

Vast multitudes of people own underwater education mortgages too — in the name of opportunity.

Students under subsidy are in triangular collusion with universities and lenders to gain access to resources that will never yield fruit.

Earlier in the piece, Wendler suggests that one can "economize and achieve goals":

[E]nroll in a technical school or community college; subscribe to online courses; attend institutions deemed to be less prestigious and less expensive; and graduate with lower debt, maybe no debt at all; leave with a degree or certificate that will crack open a door, and then prove ability and value in the workplace so that an employer might pick up the tab for the next phase. These are economic decisions that cannot be made without regard to individual financial and academic circumstances.

In short, not every student belongs in college.

Tell the truth. Give potential students the odds. "With these high school grades, this test score and class rank, the probability of finishing the degree at this university is 30 percent. There is a 70 percent chance that you will have to pay back any loans you take out for school from a high school graduate's salary, rather than a college graduate's salary, and there's no bankruptcy that will allow you to get away from them." Then let people make informed decisions.

He concludes:

Students under subsidy are in triangular collusion with universities and lenders to gain access to resources that will never yield fruit.

This ugly partnership of deceit must be addressed through academic standards that honestly incorporate the probability of a student's ultimate success; otherwise a grievous abridgment of the public trust is created.

The return on investment of a college education, as opposed to mere college attendance, is the real question. Making decisions about who is qualified to borrow money needs to be central to the responsibility matrix of university leadership, not an afterthought.

You'll find the complete piece here.

Related entries
■ “Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education.”

■ “‘You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.’”

■ Community college

■ Paying for college, revisited

■ Paying for college: A rant of modest proportions

■ About college

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

"Aw! What'd they do?! Send me a daggone Houdini?!"

Laughing hurts, and this about slayed me.


And this one, too.

Recovering

A little something from the gift shop might read as a cliché, I know, but I have been holding onto my tiny sock monkey friend / talisman since my family visited me post-surgery. "I saw it when we got snacks," said Miss M-mv(i), "and I thought, 'That's perfect.'"

It is.

My family is.

I am not. Nor will I ever be. But I think that I will be better now.

Books for the road to recovery
♦ War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells)
♦ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Alan Jacobs)
♦ Daytripper (Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon)

DVDs for the road to recovery
♦ Waiting for Superman (2011)
♦ Westworld (1973)
♦ "Damages," Season 2, Disc 3

"'Those who proclaimed that "knowledge is power" meant that the only true education is self-education.'"

From "We Can't Teach Students to Love Reading" (The Chronicle Review, July 31):

I am not at all sure that deep attention to anything in particular can be taught in a straightforward way: It may, perhaps, only arise from within, according to some inexplicable internal necessity of being. Some people—many people—most people—will not experience that internal necessity of being in books, in texts. But for people like Erasmus (with his "cry of thankful joy" on spying a fragment of print) or Lynne Sharon Schwartz ("Can I get back to my books now?"), books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self.

But then there are the people Nicholas Carr writes about in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and Carr himself: people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it—who can't get back, as Lucy Pevensie for a time can't get back to Narnia; what was an opening to another world is now the flat planked back of a wardrobe. They're the ones who need help, and want it, and are prepared to receive it.

I had become one of those people myself, or was well on my way to it, when I was rescued through the novelty of reading on a Kindle. My hyper-attentive habits were alienating me further and further from the much older and (one would have thought) more firmly established habits of deep attention. I was rapidly becoming a victim of my own mind's plasticity, until a new technology helped me to remember how to do something that for years had been instinctive, unconscious, natural.

HT: So Many Books.

"But it does mark the high point, which means the beginning of the end."

Oh, no! It's August! How can that beeeeeeeee! *

From Mary Schmich's August 1, 2008 column, "Today begins the season's slide into fall"(Chicago Tribune):

The cicadas are loud by now. The fireflies are out. The wasps. The days are so hot and humid that the beer bottles sweat and the sheets go limp. Your garden, or your little container plants, are exploding. The air-conditioners rage.

If you merely count the days from summer's official start in June until its finale in September, August 1 doesn't even mark the summer midpoint. But it does mark the high point, which means the beginning of the end.

The light shifts, softens. The shadows on the leaves and the living room floor make you wonder: When exactly did the wane start?

People in other places may not wonder, but Chicagoans are connoisseurs of summer light. We spot the changes as surely as a foodie detects the difference between fennel and star-anise.

A Chicagoan knows that the light brightens in June. It blazes in July. It relaxes in August. By September 1, it fades.

And so on August 1, at summer's mellow peak, life quickens. Time to pick up the pace. One full month left to get it done, the vacation, the swimming, the summer baseball.

________________________________

Our August got off on the right foot. And then stumbled. And dropped to the ground.

The Misses and I had grand plans for closing the books on several courses and moving on to new texts and pursuits. But on Tuesday, August 2, I became quite ill, and although I feel better now, the treatment for the underlying issue will lay waste to our beautifully planned August.

Oh, for goodness sake. That's a little dramatic, isn't it? [Sitting up straight and getting a grip.] In truth, we only missed one archery lesson, and it seems unlikely that they will miss any piano or guitar lessons. Although I was unable to execute my end of the teacher-student transaction for all but one day last week, my students were gracious enough to give me their Sunday to recover some ground, and over the course of that productive day, I learned that they had, in fact, completed much of the work, including all of their literature assignments, sans instructor. Not ideal, to be sure, but not bad, either.

I will be able to lead two complete days of instruction this week and, by all accounts, should be "back to work" by the middle of the following week, so all is far, far from lost. We even squeezed a family film night (The Time Machine, 1960; holds up viewing after viewing -- highly recommended) and a family game night out of the weekend.

And the simple fact is that life is routine punctuated by interruptions, good and bad, and crises, large and small. You might plan a perfectly delightful Tuesday of nature walking and journaling, music practice, and studies. But all it takes is one tug too many on a permanent retainer while flossing, and POOF! Your Tuesday morning is lost to a trip to the orthodontist.

You might plan to recover the lost ground by Thursday, but while resting on the couch wondering when you'll feel right again, you observe a collection of wasps entering and exiting the gutter purposefully. One exterminator, two applications (wasps and, hey, can you take care of the gnats while you're here?), a reasonable rate, and couple hours later, you have many unmoving exoskeletons but few completed assignments to show for your afternoon.

And you might fill an entire calendar with ambitious academic plans only to toss the thing in the wastepaper basket a week later.

To be honest, I don't know why the hell I filled out that calendar. I generally find such planning tedious and shortsighted. We school year-round primarily because we appreciate the rhythms, routines, and daily (weekly, monthly, seasonal) dances and secondarily because a year-round schedule ensures that when interruptions or crises arise, we have the time and resources to deal with them. Do the next thing has been the simplest and surest way of getting the work done. No need to fill out forms, calendars, or lists.

But something possessed me to pencil in our plans to complete certain books and lessons by month's end, which pages and chapters daily. Oh, isn't that pretty?

Crumple. Toss.

Perhaps the exercise in futility was an important reminder: Ditch the too-fine planning. Leave room for the unexpected and unplanned. Life is routine punctuated by interruptions, good and bad, and crises, large and small, after all. I'll try to keep that in mind.

Related posts:

■ Sliding into fall (8.03.2008)

■ From the archives: Speaking practically (8.18.2009)

■ Connoisseurs of summer light (9.09.2010)

________________________________

* A word on the photo: It looks like the agony of defeat, doesn't it? It's just "I'm adjusting my swim cap," but, man, it looks like the kid just received some seriously awful news. Mr. M-mv caught the pic at the summer season splash party. 'been searching for a place to use it ever since.

Related aside: Are those a pianist's hands, or what?

"Life demands assessment."

From "Rate This Article: What’s Wrong with the Culture of Critique" (Wired, July 25):

There’s something heartbreaking about surrendering to strangers the delicate moment of giving order to the world. In those instances when we bring our cognitive reasoning to bear on our surroundings, when we aim our singularly human powers of evaluation at a piece of art or a fellow person, it’s a fundamental expression of the self. There are wonderfully democratic and empowering things about an Internet full of anonymous voices. But when those opinions replace our own blundering around for truth, we’re in trouble. Too much charting becomes an unnecessary handrail, too many floodlights along the dark path. I give that only two out of five stars.

"Let us have capons and sack."

As I've mentioned before, Mark Edmundson is a favorite here. In a recent article for The Chronicle Review, he muses on the current health obsession practiced by a certain segment of the American population. From "Health Now: A Provocation":

At least you'll feel better, says the well-conditioned skinny. On the contrary, comes the reply, the bursts of pleasure that food and drink reliably deliver far exceed the meager little hum of satisfaction that comes from being "in shape." Ask Falstaff. Didn't he have a better time of it than the scrawny, scheming, starveling of a prince, Hal? Surely fat Jack thought that he did. So what if he had not seen his privates for lo a decade and more. Let us have capons and sack. Or, to cite another Shakespearean high-liver: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" There will be cakes and there will be ale. "Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger will be hot i' th' mouth, too," as Feste assures us. Falstaff is a merry nihilist; the prince a tight, resentful one: Which do you prefer?

Wind turbines

"Do bees have feelings?"

From a recent Scientific American article:

As invertebrates -- animals without backbones -- bees are representatives of a diverse group accounting for over 95 percent of animal species. But despite their prevalence, not to mention their varied and often nuanced behaviors, invertebrates are sometimes regarded as life’s second string, as a mindless and unfeeling band of alien critters. If that seems a bit melodramatic, just consider our willingness to boil some of them alive.

While there’s a good deal known about invertebrate neurobiology, these facts alone haven’t settled questions of their sentience. On the one hand, invertebrates lack a cortex, amygdala, as well as many of the other major brain structures routinely implicated in human emotion. And unsurprisingly, their nervous systems are quite minimalist compared to ours: we have roughly a hundred thousand bee brains worth of neurons in our heads. On the other hand, some invertebrates, including insects, do posses the rudiments of our stress response system. So the question is still on the table: do they experience emotion in a way that we would recognize, or just react to the world with a set of glorified reflexes?

Royal falconer

Scenes from the Renaissance Faire (related entry here): Master falconer Ray Pena.
Click images to enlarge.